Handel's Messiah

27:16In this piece, and if I just go through my own bits, I'm questioning the audience. But who may abide? If God be for us, who shall be against us? O death, where is thy sting? A statement, I know that my Redeemer liveth. Asking the audience to do something. Arise, get thee up into the high mountains. Lift up thy voice. The trumpet shall sound. I'm predicting the trumpet shall sound. and behold, a virgin shall conceive. So it's very active engagement with the audience that almost demands a response from them. But I'm interested, you're also talking about the text. I'm really interested in why the music speaks to us as well.

27:56Is it because of the fusion between the text and the music? I mean, is this one of his best works musically, or is it... Maybe it's one of his richest musically. Don would be able to correct me on this. But unlike the operas and unlike a lot of the other oratorios, there's very little recitative, plain, simple plot type text. Speaking of the text. So it's very rich in arias and even richer in choruses. And also it's quite concise, I think, in the individual numbers. So we're getting huge variety all the time. And one thing that Jennings understood, sorry, this is back to the words, but it's back to the structure that Handel is actually dealing with.

28:34Jennings understood that one of Handel's main compositional methods was progression by contrast, and that is all the way through Messiah. It may be a micro-contrast, as in a single number, as in, for example, he was despised, where the outer sections, as is normal in a Baroque aria, are based on the same music, and the inner section is contrasting and is a big contrast. So deep pathos followed by outrage and anger at what has happened to Christ. or it could be a really major transition contrast as in, for example, the end of part two, the beginning of part three. We go from the grandeur of Christ's dominance and triumph over the whole created universe in the Hallelujah Chorus, drums, trumpets and so on, the whole chorus and then we come down to I know that my Redeemer liveth, the voice of the single individual and not only the single individual but the worms in the body of the individual.

29:33So Jennings absolutely understood this gift of Handel's for making contrasts. And yes, it is the words as well as the music. One almost has a sense the whole universe is there in this piece somehow, without being too hyperbolic. It has everything. It has the beginning, the end, the suffering individual, the community. It's uplifting. You can go through a whole range of emotions, as I certainly do as a performer and as a listener, there is something about the choruses, which are so every single line in the choruses are very, very singable, almost in a soloistic sense. And there's something about it which makes people want to get up on their feet.

30:14There's something about it which leads to these huge scratch messiahs, which is the Royal Albert Hall being filled with people with their dog-eared scores singing along to the choruses. I think the choruses are so incredibly strong. It's a very communal work and it's a very generous work. I'm sorry if this is again the text, but the music bears it out. Larry, my favorite bit, other than, and really not the bits I sing, but it is All We Like Sheep Have Gone Astray. And it's an example to me of how Handel is thinking dramatically, but in a different way, not in the sense of an opera or in the sense of a story.

30:49So all we like sheep have gone astray. And there's these lines that kind of go nowhere. We have to. And it's, I just smile when I hear it. and you hear this frail humanity, but then right when you least expect it, boom, F minor. And all of a sudden, it crashes in in the middle of these people. Stray sheep. These stray sheep. And it's so human and so sublime at the same time. And this is what I think is the most wonderful thing about Messiah and Handel in general, the very human and the very sublime right next to each other. And Ruth, you wanted to come in there, but you've already mentioned Jennings' spiritual dilemma and his depression.

31:38What are the sort of political and religious sensibilities in London around the time of the Messiah? I think Messiah can be understood, certainly from Genesis' point of view, as a response to, as the poet John Donne put it, the new philosophy puts all in doubt. Religious certainties, religious beliefs had been torpedoed from at least three directions. One is that God had been depersonalised. Isaac Newton had shown that the universe was not presided over by a God who notices everything we do, but a clockmaker operating by the laws of mathematics who had wound it up remote, transcendental. So how could such a God be interested in me or you individuals or in how we lead our lives and therefore how we get saved after death?

32:28Then there was, I suppose one could call it, a new respect for humanitarian morality, measured against which, how did we think of the god of the Old Testament, who after all was also the god of the New Testament, this partial unjust god who encouraged a rabble tribe coming out of Egypt, probably with pagan views in their spiritual makeup, wandering around in the desert. This was not a good father figure. and then there was actual biblical scholarship which was showing that the Bible was not, after all, directly dictated by God to one person to write down. It was the work of many different hands.

33:09It had inconsistencies. If it was actually human work, why believe it? What status did it have? So it was very easy to find grounds for scepticism. Religion was the main subject of publishing. Most people went to church. The sermon was the main public address system. So balancing these views was quite difficult for people. And there was great concern. I mean, if you look at what's actually published at the time, religious doubt is as worrying to the writers as, say, climate change or terrorism now. And it got at least as many column inches. Well, Larry, that brings me on to something else, which is that the Messiah was almost seen as too sacred by some and not sacred enough by others.

33:55How did Handel manage that balancing act? Absolutely. I think it's always been viewed that way and still is to some extent. Really interesting, one of the original reviews, someone kind of wrote into the newspaper and said, what a profanation of God's name and word is this? David said, how can we sing the Lord's song in a strange land? But sure, he would have thought it much stranger to have heard it sung in a playhouse. So the context where it was performed really incensed people of Christian faith. I'm going to fast forward and going to talk a little bit maybe about the soulful celebration, the Quincy Jones, Mervyn Warren version.

34:36You better contextualize it. I will contextualize it in that Mervyn Warren had said that they were going to do a version of the trumpet's shell sound with Dizzy Gillespie and Wynton Marsalis. One of the great what ifs of history would have been if that happened. And Wynton Marsalis said, I don't want to do this because I don't want to desecrate the Messiah. So it was very interesting, even from someone from a jazz tradition, the Messiah is seen in so many ways as this great sacred cow. It is unique in Handel's oeuvre in the sense that it is all sacred words, right? It is not just an opera manqué.

35:13It's not just a Bible story. But Ruth, you have some. Ruth's dying to come in there. Well, no, actually, just to modify that a bit, yes, of course, Messiah is unique in all sorts of ways. But it did have a predecessor in Handel's output. When Jennings is writing about sending Handel the libretto of Messiah and Handel decides he won't do it for the time being because he wants something of a gayer turn, Jennings describes it as another scripture collection. And one reason that Handel didn't pick it up, maybe, was that their previous scripture collection had actually bombed. And that was Israel in Egypt, which Handel had done two years previously and had only managed three performances.

35:51That's all biblical text. But Messiah includes New Testament text. And I think that made a great difference in 18th century England. New Testament text was more sacred than Old Testament text. And I think that's the wonderful quotation that Larry just read us about, you know, desecrating God's word. Jennings was very careful to minimise actual words of Christ and actual naming of Christ, but it is in there and of course people would have recognised it. So Donald, is there a particular event where the church appears to approve of Messiah, having been a little sceptical before about it appearing in theatres?

36:32I think that there are various aspects to this. One is, of course, the big criticism of Messiah, which is always quoted, was one newspaper article. We don't know how representative that was. Could have just been one reader. It could just have been... I mean, it's a very eloquent statement of the theatre is not the right place to do this. And actually, Handler made it worse, or someone... At the top of the score, he writes Messiah and Oratorio. Unlike some other ones in the predecessors, you often have an Oratorio or sacred drama. He doesn't do that. It's just Messiah and Oratorio, leaving certain things a little bit vague.

37:19And what's worse is that in the newspaper, they thought, well, or whoever put the advert in the newspaper, the very first London performances, they thought, Messiah, that's a bit dodgy. So there will be performed a new sacred oratorio. But that was worse, right? And that's what got the attacks on it, really. But we don't know, really, how representative the attacks were. First of all, because Handel then did two more performances. He didn't cancel Messiah after the first one. He finished the season giving two more. That's sort of one aspect to that. And then the other was that there was this question about the bishops.

38:04There's a little hint in there about it was not approved by the bishops or whatever. It may be that it had gone to the Inspector of Stage Plays. The censor, effectively. The censor. And something had happened there. But when we get to later on, and it's performed at the founding hospital, someone writes in his diary oh and there were bishops there so the hearing of Oratorio may sometime be thought of as orthodox so the whole question of the church's attitude this seems to be a few clergy one sector of the London audience but it didn't stop Handel doing it he treated it in his programmes just like any other work He didn't actually do the same work every year.

38:54But if you look at what happens, he didn't stay away from it as if it was something that was too much trouble. Ruth, you mentioned that initially when Jennings sent his libretto that Handel wanted to do something gayer, I think was how he described it. Was he then convinced by the libretto when he started studying it? Did he realise that this was the basis of something great? I think the proof of the pudding, you know, since it became his most famous work. Yes. I mean, do we think he did it justice? Yes, we do. Not everybody did. In fact, Jennings was a bit cross about some of it. We don't know precisely what.

39:37He did say that he objected to the overture. We don't know why. And in fact, the overture is a stroke of genius harmonically in the whole scheme, harmonic scheme. But Handel came back to it again and again. And I don't think that was just a financial thing. And it was an artistic issue that he came back at it again and again, presumably. Artistic and pragmatic nearly always go together. I mean, you could say that with works that actually failed when he first did them and he came back to, as is said about one of his late operas that he kept working at having to put on one side, coming back to why in the end especially as it's not very popular now did he come back to it?

40:24We might work out that he really had a fondness for some of it but Don can tell us about how many different versions handled it he must have been interested in this work to keep redoing it in different forms We've spoken about the singers but what about the orchestra? What about the orchestration of this piece which he He kept revising. I think there's a little prelude to that. I mean, I think that the situation was once Messiah was established, it got a regular slot in Handel's programme. He performed oratorios during the Lenten period and Messiah was always the last one before Easter. It had a particular place in the programme.

41:04Which was what Jennings intended, if I might interrupt. I mean, he genuinely specifically said this was for Handel to perform in Passion Tide, and he always did. Larry, nowadays we associate Handel's Messiah more with Christmas. In fact, I think it vies with Maria Carey for being the most played piece over the Christmas period. What's the connection with Christmas? I'm trying to remember, Donald, can you tell us when it started to become associated with Christmas? Dublin. Oh, Dublin. Dublin. i.e. from the beginning? Not quite. After Handel had gone back to London, the person we referred to earlier, Matthew Dubourg, the violinist, he lived sort of half the year in London and half the year in Dublin, and he was taking over charity performances.

41:55There were three charities in Dublin, and, in fact, what happened was that for the relief of debtors, that charity, they regularly performed Messiah in December. That is how it became associated first with that season. But obviously there were things in it that elsewhere people also, yeah, good idea, you know, it was taken up elsewhere. And I think certainly the first part of Messiah is kind of the Christmassy part, which is why it's become, you know, it's the shepherds. There's very comforting pastoral music, And that's the kind of favorite first part. So for many people, it's become a Christmas piece and kind of a bit of pablum that you can kind of just enjoy in Christmas.

42:43But in fact, as we know, parts two and three, there's an apocalyptic bit at the end. And there's a message in the Messiah, which is potentially very unsettling and very provocative. It is the crooked being made straight. You're comforting people who are in pain, your communities. And this can become a message to certain communities of liberation and of comfort and comforting my people. And you go out and do the comforting, not feel comfortable, right? Comfort my people, Isaiah, you comfort my people. Don't feel comfortable. So it's not a comfortable peace. It is a call to bring comfort to others.

43:25Ruth. This is such a generous work and it doesn't exclude people by being very focused on doctrine. You know, the difficult issue of the Trinity isn't there. Hell isn't there. The threatening parts of Christianity aren't there. There's no villain, is there, really? There's no villain. There's no Satan. I was meant to say, does the devil pop up? He doesn't really, does he? No, he popped up in Handel's first oratorio about salvation by Christ, which was La Resurazione in Italy. And this is a point perhaps to mention that whereas most people would have found Messiah unique and unprecedented, it wouldn't have been for Jennings because he knew that Handel had composed an oratorio about salvation through Christ for the Catholic community of Italy, that he had composed a passion oratorio for his own home Lutheran community in Germany.

44:18and now Jennings would have thought, surely it's time that the greatest composer on earth composed an oratorio about salvation for us all, for the Anglican community of England. And Ruth, to finish up, can you tell me, do you think it's ultimately redemptive, A, and B, what is its lasting appeal? Because it's a remarkable piece of work. I think if you're Christian, it's redemptive. But it's interesting that people who aren't Christian find it uplifting, warming, encouraging, joyful? Which maybe answers the second part of my question. Well, but why? I mean, the interesting part of that question, yes, I mean, it continues to be welcomed by people all over the world, people in countries which are not Christian at all, far-flung.

45:10Jennings would be so pleased that their word has gone forth unto the ends of the world. The propagation of the gospel is one of the, quote, evidences of Christianity, which Jennings is careful to include. And look, it's happened with Messiah. It all fits so neatly. The question, I suppose, can be put in terms of how was Jennings composing his libretto to match Handel's strengths as a composer, to make Handel right at the top of his game. And, you know, we could talk for an hour at least just about that. But I think one way in which it succeeds is that it's not a narrative, it's not a story, it's not the life of Christ.

45:49It's a statement of faith. And it's very elusive because it uses the Old Testament a lot rather than the gospel narrative. So the suffering servant prophet in the Old Testament is used for the elusive account of Christ's career. But this leaves it so open for Handel to write emotive music for all the strong emotional directives in the work, you know, rejoice, he was despised. These are as much emotional statements or directives as they are statements of faith. Larry? And I think finally, I just wanted to say, right as we're recording this, these messages of your warfare is accomplished. Why do the nations so furiously rage together?

46:37There's always something in the Messiah which you can connect to contemporary events. My thanks to Ruth Smith, Donald Burrows and Larry Zazzo. Next week, mathematics and the impossible perspectives of MC Escher. Thank you for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Misha and his guests. Now we're talking on our podcast bit now where we can all start complaining about the bits we missed out. Donald. Well, no, just to pick that up, I mean, there is a tease about this. There's no certainty that anything in Miss I was written for Mrs Stibber.

47:19Absolutely. If you go back to the time it's written, we don't know what Handel was thinking about his future. But I think we know he was writing for a less skilled singer. No, I don't think so. Because he didn't know what he was going to get in Dublin. I don't think so. It sort of doesn't make sense, because here's him probably saying, hmm, not opera, perhaps. I'm going somewhere else. But he writes Messiah first, which is for four voices. It looks as if he's not thinking of any particular singer. And what's really odd about it is it's a very mobile work because it's just strings, trumpets and drums.

47:59the normal cues for oboes to take part, the larger thing, you don't need a separate stave for oboes. The normal thing that he does in operas and oratorios is in some places he writes senza oboe and then tutti forte. There's none of that in Messiah. He doesn't register anything apart from the strings. And this looks like this is, as it were, mobile work that you can take anywhere. But then the whole argument is then screwed up because after it he writes Samson. Now, Samson is a London work that needs London-type soloists and heaven help us, it's got trombones in the orchestra. You won't find them in Dublin.

48:47And he wrote that second. So what on earth was he thinking during that summer period when he was writing these works? Is he thinking Dublin, London? Well, I've got something for both, you know, because in the seasons after this, when he's regularly in London, we have a pattern, which is what we get in 1941, is that he uses the summer-autumn to write two new works for the next season. That's what he's done. They're just very different from each other. I mean, what obviously made sense in the 1740s, you talk about August, September, You're living in Brook Street. The streets are quiet because everyone's off at their country houses.

49:32You know, you can have a quiet time. You can concentrate on writing the music. That pattern is there with 1741, but it doesn't quite make sense because half of it looks like this is something I might take. Had he had the invitation to Dublin at that stage, this is where I think Matthew Du Borg, the violinist... He's the violinist in Dublin. who lives half the time in London and half the time in Dublin. He has to go to Dublin because he's master of the state music, so he has to write the ode for the king's birthday that's done at Dublin Castle. So he's there basically during late autumn, winter, but he's in London for other times of the year.

50:17And it's almost certainly, it seems to me, that he must have had these conversations with Handel about Dublin. and it's a different set-up because what does Handel say about the venue? The music sounds great in this charming room. It isn't a theatre. It's a completely different sort of ambience of a concert hall. That's what he finds when he gets there. How much did he know about it in the first place? What was he thinking when he was writing, Miss I? It's very difficult. It may be worth saying that we are stymied in some of our conjectures about Handel in that we have hardly any letters from him compared with, say, Mozart.

51:04I think we have fewer than 50 letters. Do we know why that is? Is that because he just didn't write that? Perhaps they weren't kept or whatever. Better things to do. But as it happens, what we have is two excellent letters to Jennings. Yes, once he's there, but we don't have anything saying, I've decided to go to Dublin on the X of X because I've got these two works. And, I mean, it's worth saying that following on from what Don's saying about him having two completely different works on the stocks and then he takes Messiah to Dublin. We should remember that he, as we've already said, he does two complete concert seasons, two times six works before he does Messiah.

51:44And Messiah could have been a speculative thing. You know, I know I've tried and tested these other works. Let's see how they go down in the concert series. If they go really well, I'll do Messiah as a standalone thing, which is what happens. But, you know, had there been trouble about getting sufficient choir and so on, he would already have done these other works and could then go home much richer than when he came to Ireland. And I think it's worth saying, going back to this question, why is Messiah so popular? There's a practical reason. Handel had at least 10 versions of Messiah. I was going to say, when did that happen?

52:16Almost immediately he was... No. Well, I suppose year on year, right? Well, no, I mean, he has to. He's starting in the 50s. No, he has to, first of all, adapt to this business of having cathedral choir singers. Of different spaces and different... So that, therefore, Thou Shalt Break Them turns into a recitative because he doesn't have a good enough singer to do that. So some of them are practical. Some of them are stimulated by a new singer. You can't go too far with this because the overall shape of the work doesn't change. You know, what he's doing is slotting in different things in different places.

52:54There's one area which does go different, how beautiful are the feet, which is very complicated because as done by Jennings in the libretto, it's how beautiful are the feet of them, referring back to the chorus because it's referring to the company of the preachers going out, how beautiful are the feet of them. And I think in Dublin, someone said to him, you know, that bit of Isaiah, you could use how beautiful are the feet of him to refer to Messiah. And so what he does in Dublin is to set a subtly different text, how beautiful are the feet of him. And I think that's one of the things that Janus doesn't like.

53:43He said, that's not what I meant. I mean, Handel, I think, was a very practical composer. He was always responding to the singers he had, to the forces he had. I've done Messiah at least over 100 performances, and I don't think I've ever done it in exactly the same version. Every conductor, especially in part three, how long or not to make it. You can make it shorter. You can make it longer, depending on the singers you have and what you like about certain movements. There are certain movements that were written for soprano, but also were performed for alto. I've done a two-alto version of He Shall Feed His Flock, which is very, very beautiful, but very rare.

54:21And that adaptability also in terms of forces, and we didn't really talk about the 19th century where you had these mega messiahs, messiahs on steroids with hundreds in the choir, and they got bigger and bigger and bigger. And then with the historical performance movement, we've done it with very small forces. I've done it both ways, and it's exciting in both ways. It's sublime in both cases. You also mentioned the Winter Marsalis saying that he didn't want to desecrate the work. And you briefly referred to the Quincy Jones soulful celebration. I listened to that in preparation for the program.

54:55I have to say it's a spectacular piece of work because there seems to be a communality between what Handel was trying to do and the tradition of gospel in particular, but also preaching. I think let's go back to comfort, right? This is a message of comfort to a community, a formerly enslaved community. We're talking about the Israelites here. And this is a very powerful message to communities of color, especially formerly enslaved communities. and interesting thing Mervyn Warren said who was one of the main arrangements he said we hear Messiah and it's lofty and regal and elegant but Handel was scorned in his day that's really interesting and we think of Handel as being this absolute rock star but he did have some pretty rocky stages in his career and right when he was composing Messiah was potentially one of his very low points and certainly in the mythology about Handel it becomes absolutely, as you say, rock bottom for Handel and, you know, he's ill, wrong, he's broke, wrong, and, you know, he goes without food for the three weeks that he's composing it, you know, that's the myth.

56:08That's really fascinating because I read the Stefan Zweig. There you go, that's exactly the source, yes. And that was, he was ill, he was broke, the people were chasing him at the door for his debts. But that narrative is very powerful for people, isn't it? Yeah, it is. But also I think that if people don't know the work, you get this myth that it might end with the Hallelujah Chorus. It's true. It doesn't, you know. And in many ways, in terms of composition, the best arias are in part three. Well, certainly I know that my Redeemer live up, you're missing out on something. And also, If God Be For Us, which often is, if you look at the actual musical composition, what he's writing, it's an extremely good piece.

56:54He actually takes, as it were, well, actually, both of those are interesting because whereas the operatic Da Capo aria, A, B, you know, as he's working from biblical texts, the two big arias there are three verse texts. They're in three sections. And everyone moves on from the previous verse. You know, that's something I think that doesn't happen in any of the other arias. There's something different. But on the Hallelujah Chorus, presumably the reason why that has become so popular is it's a big old sing-along. And, you know, people do feel uplifted by that communal experience. Yeah. Perhaps it's worth going in here that the flash mob hallelujah choruses, do we know what flash mob choruses are?

57:46Flash mobs are choruses that appear apparently spontaneously in big squares. Exactly, in shopping malls. Yes, yes, yes. But there are hundreds of iPhones filming the whole thing. So if you look on YouTube at flash mob hallelujah choruses and count up the number of views that the main ones have had, it comes to over 70 million, which is more than the population of Britain. Time for a cup of tea. In Our Time with Misha Glennie is produced by Simon Tillotson and it's a BBC Studios production. Some events have far-reaching consequences. The white noise, everything goes black and apparently I was screaming.

58:29That's the moment that my life changed forever. I'm Dr Sian Williams and I'm meeting the people whose lives have been reshaped in unexpected ways. That broke my heart. I just thought that it's so cruel. Personal stories of loss, discovery and starting over. We do talk about it time to time and about how grateful we are to be in this country to be able to be free. Life Changing from BBC Radio 4. Listen now on BBC Sounds.

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